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Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Novel Writing and Development From Premise to Publication
HASTE IS A WRITER'S SECOND WORST ENEMY, HUBRIS BEING THE FIRST, AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Author Connect. Created and nurtured by Algonkian Writer Events and Programs, this website is dedicated to enabling aspiring authors in all genres to become commercially published. The various and unique forum sites herein provide you with the best and most comprehensive writing, development, and editorial guidance available online. And you might well ask, what gives us the right to make that claim? Our track record for getting writers published for starters. Regardless, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" (NWOE) forum. Peruse the development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide partitioned into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by sampling the editorial, advice review, and next-level craft archives found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a realistic path to publication. In a world overflowing with misleading and erroneous novel writing advice our goal is to become your primary and tie-breaking source .
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source - From the Heart, But Smart
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout. And btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a publishable novel. And while you're at it, feel free to become an AAC member (sign up above). It's free and always will be.
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Novel Writing Courses and "Novel Writing on Edge" Work and Study Forums
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Novel Writing on Edge - Nuance, Bewares, Actual Results
Platitudes, entitled amateurism, popular delusions, and erroneous information are all conspicuously absent from this collection. From concept to query, the goal is to provide you, the aspiring author, with the skills and knowledge it takes to realistically compete. Our best Algonkian craft archives.
So Where Do I go Now?
Labors, Sins, and Six Acts
Crucial Self-editing Techniques
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Bad Novel Writing Advice - Will it Never End?
The best "bad novel writing advice" articles culled from Novel Writing on Edge. The point isn't to axe grind, rather to warn writers about the many writer-crippling viruses that float about like asteroids of doom. And check out what Isabel says. OMG!
Margaret Atwood Said That?
Don't Outline the Novel?
Critique Criteria for Writer Groups
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Art and Life in Novel Writing
Classic and valuable archive. Misc pearls of utility plus takeaways on craft learned from books utilized in the AAC novel writing program including "Write Away" by Elizabeth George and "The Art of Fiction" by Gardner. Also, evil authors abound!
The Perfect Query Letter
The Pub Board - Your Worst Enemy?
Eight Best Prep Steps Prior to Agent Query
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The Short and Long of It
Our veteran of ten thousand submissions, Walter Cummins, pens various essays and observations regarding the art of short fiction writing, as well as long fiction. Writer? Author? Editor? Walt has done it all. And worthy of note, he was the second person to ever place a literary journal on the Internet, and that was back in early 1996. We LOVE this guy!
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Quiet Hands, Unicorn Mech, Novel Writing Vid Reviews, and More
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Novel Writing Advice Videos - Who Has it Right?
Archived AAC reviews of entertaining, informative, and ridiculous novel writing videos found on YT. The mission here is to validate good advice while exposing terrible advice that withers under scrutiny. Our thanks to the Algonkian Critics.
Stephen King's War on Plot
Writing a Hot Sex Scene
The "Secret" to Writing Award Winning Novels?
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Unicorn Mech Suit
Olivia's UMS is a place where SF and fantasy writers of all types can acquire inspiration, read fascinating articles and perhaps even absorb an interview with one of the most popular aliens from the Orion east side.
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Audrey's Archive - Reviews for Aspiring Authors
An archive of book reviews taken to the next level for the benefit of aspiring authors. This includes a unique novel-development analysis of contemporary novels by Algonkian Editor Audrey Woods. Very cool!
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Writing With Quiet Hands
All manner of craft, market, and valuable agent tips from someone who has done it all: Paula Munier. We couldn't be happier she's chosen Algonkian Author Connect as a base from where she can share her experience and wisdom. We're also hoping for more doggie pics!
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Crime Reads - Suspense, Thrillers, Crime, Gun!
CrimeReads is a culture website for people who believe suspense is the essence of storytelling, questions are as important as answers, and nothing beats the thrill of a good book. It's a single, trusted source where readers can find the best from the world of crime, mystery, and thrillers. No joke,
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New York Write to Pitch and Algonkian Writer Conferences 2025
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New York Write to Pitch 2023, 2024, 2025
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- Algonkian and New York Write to Pitch Prep Forum
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For Write to Pitch and Algonkian event attendees or alums posting assignments related to their novel or nonfiction. Publishers use this forum to obtain relevant info before and after the conference event.
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Algonkian Writer Conferences - Events, FAQ, Contracts
Algonkian Programs create carefully managed environments that allow you to practice the skills and learn the knowledge necessary to approach the development and writing of a competitive novel.
Upcoming Events and Programs
Pre-event - Models, Pub Market, Etc.
Algonkian Conferences - Book Contracts
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Algonkian Novel Development and Editorial Program
This novel development and writing program conducted online here at AAC was brainstormed by the faculty of Algonkian Writer Conferences and later tested by NYC publishing professionals for practical and time-sensitive utilization.
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There’s no Valentine’s Day Movie Like Some Like It Hot
When I say that you should watch Some Like It Hot (1959) this Valentine’s Day, I don’t just mean you should watch it because it’s a romantic comedy, or even because it’s one of the best romantic comedies of all time. I mean, it’s about Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day, 1929, to be specific. To be even more specific, it is a retelling of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the mob killing of seven associates of Chicago’s North Side gang in a parking garage on Valentine’s Day, 1929. This makes Some Like It Hot a crime movie just as much as a romantic comedy. Which means… Welcome to CrimeReads, Joe, Daphne, and Sugar! I hope no one reading this website doesn’t know the plot of this film, but just in case… it is the story of two musicians, Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis) who witness a mob execution and go on the run, disguising themselves as women and joining a traveling all-female jazz band headed to a residency at a Florida hotel. In the band, they meet Sugar (Marilyn Monroe), the band’s lead singer, newly single and determined to change her approach to love. Both men (via their alter-egos Josephine, for Joe, and Daphne, for Jerry) are interested in Sugar, but Joe is determined to get her to fall for him via any means necessary… including re-cross-dressing as a man. He pretends to be a millionaire, the scion of an oil family, while Jerry-as-Daphne finds herself pursued by an actual millionaire, Osgood Fielding III (the incredible Joe. E. Brown)… which she actually kind of likes? But then the very gangsters looking for Joe and Jerry wind up arriving at the very Florida hotel where the band is playing, and our heroes need to pull off one last flamboyant escape. Some Like It Hot isn’t about becoming multiple things, one after the other, but being multiple things all along If, in my mentioning both its Valentine’s Day setting and crimey genre-wear, I sound like I’m looking for a topical excuse to write about Some Like It Hot, it’s because I am. But I also think that Some Like It Hot’s Valentine’s Day-setting and crimey elements are essential to its success. Or, at least, they account for some of it. The film writer Sam Wasson attributes this success to Some Like It Hot’s secret underlying theme: not one of any specific genre, but one of “reversal,” more broadly. He writes, “Some Like It Hot is so entrenched in its theme, the theme of reversal, that the movie itself keeps changing its costume, beginning—or so it seems—as a gangster picture before changing into a musical, then a comedy, then a romance.” He continues, “Reversals, small and large, run the length of the picture; they are its comic oxygen, taking the form of sight gags (a hearse—that runs booze), sound gags ([Tony] Curtis speaking in a high voice), character twists ([Jack] Lemmon’s character gets hornier when dressed as a woman), and innuendo. The sheer density of reversals—the number of ironies per cinematic square inch—not only keeps the laughs coming, and coming on thematic point, it pumps Some Like It Hot full of momentum, continually refreshing the drama, like a palate cleanser for our attention spans.” But this makes sense. Indeed, with his use of the word “costumes,” Wasson has hit upon the film’s greatest point: Some Like It Hot isn’t merely about ordinary “reversals” but disguises, specifically. It’s a magic act of a movie, a parade of endless hats and wigs all being pulled off the same body, one after the other. That’s the thing about disguise: it’s not entirely a method of concealing identity, but a method of multiplying identity (a disguise is, after all, only recognizable as a disguise after it has been removed, and an additional identity has been made plain). Some Like It Hot isn’t about becoming multiple things, one after the other, but being multiple things all along, and allowing those different sides to take turns seeing the light. It is worth briefly nothing that Some Like It Hot‘s shifting identities have allowed the film various progressive readings, especially along the lines of gender and sexuality. In 1978, Brandon French wrote “What Some Like It Hot affirms is neither heterosexual nor homosexual, nor even female, but rather the abolition of those absolute poles in favor of an androgynous continuum.” Wasson agrees with this reading, but suggests that Wilder wasn’t out to make any wise points about these subjects: “He thought cross-dressing was funny. He thought Americans, dizzy in the rat race, were funny: ‘You’re a guy, and why would a guy want to marry a guy?’ ‘Security.’ That’s Wilder capitalism speaking, not love or lust or even man or woman. Some Like It Hot isn’t Tootsie; it’s not interested in how the experience of being a woman can make men better men. This is a Billy Wilder movie; it’s about the Machiavellian lengths to which people will go to get what they want, which is never much nobler than money, sex, or self-preservation.” Thus, Some Like It Hot is so deft at juggling its identities that it is able to take on a progressive reading about identity, regardless of intent. Anyway, according to these themes of reversals and disguises, Some Like It Hot’s setting on and around Valentine’s Day makes perfect sense. Valentine’s Day is a holiday of kaleidoscopic associations, often of a dual nature (romance/heartbreak, togetherness/loneliness). It’s also a date of a very famous 20th century mass murder; in that context, it’s a day of gangsters, of blaring tommy guns, and revenge. In Catholic tradition, Valentine’s Day is the feast day of St. Valentine, the third-century Roman clergyman Valentinus who became known as a messenger of God after he restored sight to a blind daughter of the Roman judge Asterius. Valentinus’s unbridled preaching, however, led to several arrests and an eventual audience with Emperor Claudius II of Rome, who, after Valentinus attempted to convert him, ordered him to renounce his faith or suffer execution. Valentinus chose death, and was tortured by clubbing before his eventual beheading. Apparently, he sent a letter to Asterius’s daughter before his death, signed “your Valentine,” which inspired the modern tradition of love notes. Besides the general themes of murder and friendship, this morsel of ancient history has nothing to do with Some Like It Hot, especially because Some Like It Hot is a movie about two guys who compromise everything they understand about themselves to save their skins… while the story of St. Valentine is the story of a man sticking to his own beliefs in the face of certain death. Then again… Some Like It Hot is also a tale of risking everything and keeping extraordinary faith in what one is doing. It’s a screwball comedy, which means that characters act with their basest instincts, juggle as many things as possible, and don’t worry about things falling apart. They sort of know things won’t. But it also means that these characters implicitly operate on a level of incredible trust that there is some sort of plan they are following, some sort of sense that things will work out the way they are supposed to. This way, Some Like It Hot, with all its narrative meanderings and cockamamie exchanges and shifting appearances, reveals itself to be a very committed, serious, sophisticated entity. As Wasson has said, “Some Like It Hot is built—by [Billy] Wilder and [I.A.L.] Diamond—on an unassailable foundation of structural and thematic integrity.” To perform all of its magic tricks so well, the film needs to be extremely tight and controlled, a perfect engine of spectacle. It needs to know what it’s doing and why it’s doing it, at every moment. I kind of like that St. Valentine’s Day as a romantic holiday seems like a stretch from its proto-Medieval historical inspiration, because I like trying to de-elasticize that stretch, find the less-than-obvious connections between the two of them, often by plotting new points on the cultural spectrum between them. In order to reach their full potential, both romantic love and early Christian sainthood involve intense, whole-body, self-assured commitment… and, when you think about it, so does screwball comedy. So does everything about Some Like It Hot. View the full article -
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Luigi Mangione, George Metesky, and a Tradition of Anti-Corporate Violence
Luigi Mangione, the man charged with murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Midtown Manhattan last month, who currently awaits trial at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, was not the anomalous actor press accounts have made him out to be. On the contrary, he fits the mold of a recurring type of violent anti-corporate missionary dating back at least to the middle of the last century. Americans have no exclusive claim on violent estrangement, of course, but murderous anti-authoritarian zealots appear to be part of our heritage. Mangione bears particular resemblance to George Metesky, an aggrieved Con Edison employee who anonymously set off more than twenty homemade bombs, culminating in the late-1950s, after receiving paltry compensation for lung damage and tuberculosis brought on by a power plant furnace blast. Like Mangione, Metesky acted in revenge for what he considered an insufficient medical response by a corporate power. Both imagined themselves as heroes, crusaders on behalf of the ordinary and defenseless. Metesky’s grandiosity and distorted grasp of reality would later be attributed to paranoid schizophrenia. Ironically, most of Metesky’s bombs exploded a short distance from where Mangione raised his pistol. Metesky’s eighteenth bomb, for example, exploded in the orchestra seats of Radio City Music Hall, just four blocks from the Thompson shooting. The blast, on November 7 1954, inflicted deep puncture wounds on the legs and elbows of two women during a showing of Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Two boys received contusions. For years Metesky gloated over his knack for dodging the police, for showing them up. It was easy, almost too easy. He could toy with them— taunt them— with impunity. Even after police apprehended him at his Connecticut home he was convinced that normal rules of law did not apply to him. He floated above such things, like a hero with supernatural powers. There is about Mangioni the same sense of an anti-hero bandit, an outlaw who cleverly evaded authorities, at least for a few days, with his electric-bike ride to Central Park where he walked unobserved by security cameras. Both men wrote manifestos denouncing the malignant corporate forces aligned against them. Mangione etched his 9 mm shell casings with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose,” terms commonly employed by health insurers to skirt compensation. After Mangione’s arrest, in Altoona, Pennsylvania, officials recovered a backpack containing the gun, fake identification and a three-page handwritten screed in which he states his “ill will toward corporate America….these parasites had it coming.” Metesky expressed the same sentiments in a series of rambling, raging letters, published in the now defunct New York Journal American, flagship of the Hearst empire and New York’s most read afternoon newspaper of that period. “I got a sample of what you call ‘our American system of justice’” he wrote. “You people ask me to surrender myself–well sir–who is really guilty–you or I?…. I will bring Con Edison to justice. They will pay for their dastardly deeds.” Metesky cryptically signed his letters “F.P.” When a detective asked what the initials stood for, he said “Fair Play.” With those two words, barely whispered, the manhunt came to a quiet end. Metesky became an unlikely folk hero to a certain strain of disaffected protesters. A decade after Metesky had receded from public notice, the Yippies adopted him as a patron saint, occasionally signing his name on violent screeds. Abbie Hoffman wrote his 1967 book, “Fuck the System,” using George Metesky as a nom de plume. A sequel, “Steal This Book,” contains step-by-step instructions on assembling pipe bombs with a flattering attribution to Metesky. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, drew inspiration from George Metesky’s long campaign. We know that Mangione, in turn, studied Kaczynski’s 35,000-word manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” published in The New York Times and Washington Post, and later released as a book. In a Goodreads review, Mangione called Kaczynski’s writings “interesting” and praised him as a “political revolutionary.” Could authorities have prevented these acts? Hard to say. Metesky assembled his pipe bombs in the privacy of a neglected garage. Kaczynski retreated to a remote cabin. Mangione dropped from sight in the weeks before making his way to Midtown with a gun stashed in his backpack. As criminal profilers tell us, the fanatic plans in silence. *** View the full article -
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Speculative Murder Mysteries and Alternative History Thrillers Out in 2025
I’m tired of living in this world. Let’s take some time to imagine others. These authors have done so in spades, crafting immersive narratives full of possibility (and also at least some kind of nefarious doings because this is a CrimeReads list). Whether you’re looking for fantasy noir, science fiction heists, or alternative imaginings of the past, you’ll find something on this list to distract, entertain, and possibly even inspire. Hope springs eternal, especially in genre fiction. Makana Yamamoto, Hammagang Luck (Harper Voyager, January 14) Hawaiians in space, planning a heist—what’s not to love? In this queer anti-capitalist caper, former outlaw Edie is determined to abide by the law after 8 years in prison, but their loved ones are in need of more money than a regular job can provide—so Edie reluctantly agree to one last job, organized by Angel, their femme-fatale-will-they-or-won’t-they former partner in crime, and the source of much unresolved sexual tension with the novel’s handsome enby lead. Angel’s got a plan to rob the richest man in the galaxy, and she’s assembled a team that might just pull off the toughest heist in galactic history. Margarita Montimore, The Dollhouse Academy (Flatiron, February 11) In her new novel, Montimore takes the star factory studio system of turn-of-the-millenium pop music into a speculative thrill ride with deep implications for the future of art. The Dollhouse Academy follows two young strivers, bursting with potential and ripe for exploitation, as they begin training at an elite academy dedicated to shaping today’s raw talent into tomorrow’s stars. I’ll let readers discover the speculative elements on their own, but I will say that the ending was quite satisfying. Nick Newman, The Garden (Putnam, February 18) If Emily Bronte had written On the Beach, it might have read something like this. Two aging sisters, safe behind a high wall and forgotten by the disintegrating world, find their small kingdom upended by the arrival of a young boy. Will they accept him into the fold, or will he lead them out of the garden? Or will a darker series of events come to pass? I found myself haunted by this dark fable and impressed with the balance between archetype and story. Cory O’Brien, Two Truths and a Lie (Pantheon, March 4) It’s hard to believe this is Cory O’Brien’s debut, given the sophisticated plotting and world-weary tone—Two Truths and a Lie already feels bound to be a classic. O’Brien channels the spirit of Hammett and Chandler in his futuristic ode to Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, set in a future Los Angeles mostly inundated with water and home to a wide variety of scrappy denizens, hustling con artists, and veterans of the AI wars (both human and machine). The scruffy antihero narrating me tale is a former drone operator turned fact checker who finds himself embroiled in a Byzantine plot featuring erased memories, manipulative rich people, and dark secrets, with more twists than a mid-century candy wrapper. The conclusion is logical, devastating, and necessary. Silvia Park, Luminous (Simon and Schuster, March 11) A United Korea in the nearish future is the setting for Silvia Park’s deeply human take on artificial life. The estranged children of a robotics pioneer are reunited by the search for a missing, and rare, robot unit, one who may lead them to their sorely missed, and entirely artificial, brother. Alex Gonzalez, rekt (Erewhon, March 25) Alex Gonzalez has perfectly captured the horrors of the dark web in this disturbing exploration of grief, trauma, and violence. After Sammy loses his girlfriend of almost a decade to a shocking car accident, he finds himself drawn to the worst possible content online, trying to numb himself to personal misery through dedicated consumption of public tragedies. When he finds himself on a site that appears to show not just how someone died, but all the ways they could have died, he can’t look away. Who are the people responsible for such a sick exercise in creativity? And does he want to stop them, or join them? Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption (Del Rey, April 1) Robert Jackson Bennett’s immersive world-building, engaging characterizations, and intricate mysteries are once again on display in this second mystery to feature the Watson-and-Sherlock duo of Ana Dolabra and Dinios Kol, investigators for a vast empire full of cruel masters and strange magicks. This book was so fucking creepy and good. Y’all all need to read it so we can all talk about the shroud. Jane Flett, Freakslaw (Zando, April 1) THIS BOOK IS EVERYTHING. In an ode to Tod Browning’s Freaks, Kathryn Dunn’s Geek Love, and Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, a carnival with sinister intentions arrives in a town with a terrible past, ready to unleash chaos on the conforming while liberating the weird. Grotesque, creepy, and celebratory, Freakslaw is sure to be one biggest books of the year (and possibly, one of the defining novels of the century). Adam Oyebanji, Esperance (DAW, May 20) Adam Oyebanji has crafted another brilliant melange of science fiction and murder mystery, with a heady dose of Afrofuturism thrown into the mix. In a seemingly impossible crime, a number of bodies are found drowned in seawater, and far from the ocean. Meanwhile, a woman with strange talents and even stranger technologies seeks information related to a singular 18th-century voyage marked by disaster and cruelty. The Esperance does something very tricky, and does it quite well indeed. Caitlin Starling, The Starving Saints (Harper Voyager, May 20) A castle under siege and about to run out of food is the setting for Starling’s latest. When mysterious strangers arrive promising victory and sustenance, the defenders let them in, but at what cost? And what bargains must be struck to be rid of them? This book was messed up (in the best way). Tochi Onyebuchi, Harmattan Season (Tor, May 27) Tochi Onyebuchi is one of the most creative writers around, and Harmattan Season showcases both his world-building talents and his sly sense of humor. Set in a West African city full of traditional magic and annoying French colonizers, Harmattan Season follows a rumpled private eye looking into a string of murders that have baffled the occupiers and worried the locals. Vaishnavi Patel, Ten Incarnations of Rebellion (Ballantine, June 3) In this epic alternative history of Indian independence, the movements of the 30s and 40s are brutally suppressed to the point of failure, and it is the next generation, in the 1960s, who must take up the mantle of revolution and overthrow their colonial masters. The book is arranged in ten chapters referencing incidents in the life of Vishnu, adding cultural depth to an already-compelling narrative. Markus Redmond, Blood Slaves (Dafina, July 29) Another alternative history! Markus Redmond has crafted a truly epic reimagining of the 19th century, in which an ancient vampire enslaved on a plantation becomes the catalyst for a widespread slave rebellion and violent reckoning with injustice. It’s clear throughout the narrative that the true monsters are not the vampires, who need blood to survive, but the slave-owners, who require human suffering in the name of profit. Redmond’s novel should be one of the most satisfying of the year, and perhaps of the decade. Melissa Pace, The Once and Future Me (Henry Holt, August 19) This book will blow your mind!!!! It kind of felt like a Marvel movie, but like, one that’s actually good! Pace’s amnesiac heroine, locked up in a mental institution and subjected to strange experimental procedures, must escape her padded prison and find out what exactly she’s forgotten, and what role her husband has played in all this, well, madness. I cannot tell you more without spoilers, but even as someone who reads 150+ books a year, I was genuinely surprised. View the full article -
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Why Posh London Is Just as Good A Setting For Mysteries as Any Gritty Side Street
British crime writing is famed for its grittiness: hard-bitten cops risking all in the war against drugs, gangs, human trafficking and corruption. Favoured backdrops are the high-rise council estates of Glasgow or London’s East End, where it’s entirely realistic that every utterance begins and ends with the f word. In real life, of course, crime is not restricted to a particular social class. One of the most enduringly fascinating murders in recent British history is that of Lord ‘Lucky’ Lucan, the earl who bludgeoned the family nanny to death on 7 November 1974, before escaping in a borrowed Ford Corsair and disappearing, well, forever. Last Christmas yet another film about the ‘murderous peer’ was aired, in the form of a BBC documentary miniseries. The most shocking aspect of the crime was not its brutality, nor even that the perpetrator and his pals were British aristocrats, but that it took place at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, in the heart of London’s most expensive residential district. Like Regent’s Park and parts of Kensington, Belgravia is a magnificent architectural set piece: 200 gleaming acres of white stucco and gracious gardens, designed and constructed by Thomas Cubitt between 1830 and 1847. Walking around today, it looks very much as it must have done then (imagine horses and landaus instead of cars) and remains under the draconian control of the family which commissioned it, under the auspices of the Grosvenor Estate. I have an albeit slender personal connection with the Lucan case – a friend of mine was sent in to babysit Lady Lucan in the days after the murder. Her ladyship – Veronica – would spend the afternoon stretched out on the marital bed, smoking cigarettes and watching TV. ‘Look!’ she’d drawl, eyes wide. ‘We’re famous.’ As I’m never likely to live in Belgravia (alas), I thought the next best thing would be to write a story set there, which is how I embarked on my cozy crime debut, Knife Skills For Beginners. Recently bereaved Paul Delamare, a talented chef and food writer, has been left ‘the smallest house in Belgravia’ – a two-up, two-down cottage perched above Sloane Square tube station. What with estate charges and compulsory maintenance, Paul has to watch every penny, while neighbours – when they’re not on the slopes at Zermatt or sunning themselves on their superyachts – luxuriate in five-storey mansions, complete with swimming pools, home cinemas and underground garages. My story zigzags between Paul’s tiny pad and – in brutal contrast – the faded grandeur of the Chester Square Cookery School, a five-minute walk away, with ten bedrooms and clerestory ballroom. ‘London is famously a city where the socioeconomic picture might change entirely from one end of the street to another,’ declares Alex Hay, historical suspense author, whose two novels, The Housekeepers and The Queen Of Fives, are set in Edwardian Mayfair, across the park from Belgravia. ‘This has always been a place where extreme wealth lives cheek-by-jowl with desperation and poverty.’ It makes sense: rich people need servants – hence the poky mews and service lanes behind the big properties, originally for horses and deliveries, grooms and footmen. And they’re also magnets for robbers and felons: if you’re looking to lift a Bentley or snatch a string of pearls, you won’t find many in Tower Hamlets. ‘For The Queen of Fives I spent a lot of time looking at real-life con-artists of the late nineteenth century – those charlatans and imposters who infiltrated the wealthiest corners of society on both sides of the Atlantic. Really, the extraordinary thing is how much they could get away with. But this was an age of slower communications. False heiresses could operate in plain sight for months before being rumbled.’ ‘All is not as it seems’ could equally be a catchline for The Attic at Wilton Place (2023), the story of a hard-up student dazzled by her godmother’s Belgravia lifestyle by C E Rose (the pen name of Caroline England). Rose explains her choice of setting. ‘I walked those silent weirdly silent pavements, took in the beautiful architecture, the pillars, grand doors and basements. I stroked the railings with curious fingers, peered into the panelled windows and thought to myself: what goes on behind those voluptuous drapes? There’ll surely be something dark and forbidden behind the innocent, beautiful façade…’ The Wilton Place townhouse, with its sumptuous drawing rooms and sweeping staircases, is a reflection of the godmother – Vanessa’s – psyche: ‘Elegant and charming, beguiling and full of tempting riches on the outside, but not necessarily the same within. Up in the attic, there’s a hidden room with disturbing secrets, just as there are in Vanessa’s head.’ Previously a divorce lawyer in an affluent part of northern England, Rose has more knowledge than most of the betrayal, controlling behaviour, hidden vices and sexual deviance that can lurk behind apparent respectability. Her latest thriller, The Return of Frankie Whittle (just out), was inspired by a visit to a gated community build on the site of a Victorian workhouse. ‘The silence, the immaculate walkways and identical gardens gave me strong Stepford Wives and other modern horror vibes.’ Another crime series set in Belgravia is by Natasha Cooper, now the crime correspondent for London’s Literary Review. ‘Thirty-odd years ago, while I was writing seriously researched historical novels, I decided to venture into light-hearted crime and came up with a sleuth with a double life. Half the time she was senior civil servant Willow King, despised by her colleagues for her drab clothes and even drabber private life; for the rest of each week she was the ragingly successful romantic novelist Cressida Woodruffe, who lived in a ravishing flat in Belgravia and had a highly satisfactory love life.’ The first of this classic series was published as Festering Lilies in the UK and A Common Death in the US. Given the opulence and glamour of a Belgravia setting, I wonder if I might be slightly jealous of the people who live there, and by embroiling them in a grisly murder I’m unconsciously punishing them for being wealthy and fortunate. I ask Alex Hay if he feels the same about Edwardian Mayfair: ‘Would I enjoy thundering through those gaslit streets in my expensive brougham, with countless mysteries to solve and a silken top hat in one hand? Well, yes! Yes I would! But I have a feeling that the significant health benefits and sundry comforts of living in modern-day London might outweigh my initial enthusiasm.’ I can see what a strain it places on poor Paul Delamare, dreading another bill arriving in the morning post, so on balance I agree Belgravia is best left to the oligarchs. *** View the full article -
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Write to Pitch - March 2025
1.Story Statement: Nick sets out to film a documentary about his father, Martin Shade, a famous jazz musician who disappeared when Nick was eight years old. 2. Antagonist: The novel is plotted on three levels. The first level is Nick and his high school girlfriend, Vanessa Gibb, interviewing people who played a crucial role in Martin’s life. The story takes an unexpected turn when Nick and Vanessa discover a secret love affair and the existence of a musical instrument that used to belong to Martin and that everyone covets, which pits Nick against unknown antagonistic forces. The second plot line is Martin Shade playing in a racially-integrated jazz trio in the sixties, in Joe Erskine’s territory. Joe Erskine is the mafia-connected owner of the San Francisco club where Shade Mann Bates, Martin’s trio, plays nine months of the year. Everybody knows Erskine is ruthless in his business dealings and the club is a physical representation of himself, dark and sinister. Erskine is jealous of Martin, but prefers to keep him close by exploiting Martin’s drug addiction to keep him employed and dependent. When Martin’s reliability as a musician deteriorates, Erskine convinces his bandmates to replace him, sending Martin on a downward spiral that brings him face to face with the forces that are set to destroy him. The third sub-plot is a love triangle between Martin Shade, Nick’s mother and Desmond Bates, a brilliant Black pianist and Martin’s bandmate. As the two musicians compete for Marisa’s love, their friendship is tested. Conflict rises and intertwines with the other two plot lines to bring the novel to denouement. 3.Titles: “Thermidor” – Nick grew up listening to his father’s music and in particular to “Thermidor” an album recorded a few weeks before Martin Shade went missing, which became a jazz standard. Growing up, Nick suspected the album was related to his father’s disappearance. “Shade” – born Martin Shrader, Nick’s father changed his name to “Shade” when he moved to San Francisco from the East Bay to become a professional musician. “Glen Park” – the San Francisco neighborhood where the novel takes place and the name of Thermidor’s third track evoking a shared bus ride where Bates and Nick’s mother fell in love. 4.Genre: Thriller Comps: This story will resonate with readers who appreciated “The Shadow of the Wind” by Carlos Ruiz Zafon for the quest with lively characters in vivid settings and "The Ocean at the End of the Lane," by Neil Gaiman by the way the novel weaves rich stories with imaginative and fantastical elements. Fans of the movie "Green Book" and the HBO series "Tremé" will also find affinities with this novel. 5. Write your own hook line (logline) with conflict and core wound. Nick’s father disappeared thirty years ago after recording Thermidor. Now Nick must find out what happened to him and recover a trumpet that wields special powers. 6. Sketch out the conditions for the inner conflict your protagonist will have. Why will they feel in turmoil? Conflicted? Anxious? Sketch out one hypothetical scenario in the story wherein this would be the case--consider the trigger and the reaction. Central Conflict. Nick Shade is no stranger to loss. He grew up haunted by his father’s disappearance and stopped enjoying music after his mother died of cancer. When Vanessa Gibb asks for his help filming a documentary about his father, Nick has become complacent and is stuck in a job as a camara operator for a local TV channel. At first, he resists rekindling any hope of finding his father, but is seduced by Vanessa and agrees to help her on condition that they keep his identity secret - he does not want the spotlight on him. As they conduct interviews for the documentary, Nick hides behind the camera, as narrator and witness, the way he has lived his life so far, but progressively gains agency and is forced to take action. Hypothetical: Throughout the novel Nick remains conflicted about finding the truth, as disturbing as it may be, by delving deeper into his parents’ secret history. When he and Vanessa discover a love affair between his mother and Bates, despite his first impulse to deny it, Nick is gnawed by curiosity. Abetted by Vanessa, he breaks into Bates’ house in Bayou St. John in the middle of the night and steals his mother’s diaries. With this information they reconstruct the past and Nick’s struggle begins to distinguish reality from his imagination. Throughout the novel, Nick and Vanessa harbor feelings for each other, share tender moments and even consummate their long-lost love affair. However, Nick finds reality is not what it seems, and that Vanessa is part of a complex web weaved around him. To win, Nick must reconcile with his past and make peace with his lost father. Secondary Conflict Martin Shade and Desmond Bates are friends, bandmates and opposites. Martin is white, Bates is black. Martin is brash and impulsive, Bates is disciplined and thoughtful. They play in a jazz trio in the sixties when the Civil Rights are little more than fresh ink on paper. Hypothetical: While on tour in a town south of the Mason-Dixon a man hurts Bates for using the hotel swimming pool. Martin bludgeons and abducts the man to Bates’ horror who disapproves of violence but who is nonetheless grateful. Bates then repays the favor when Martin gets in trouble with Erskine. Their friendship is constantly tested and affected by social forces, especially when Bates and Marisa are attacked by three robbers who mistake them for an interracial couple when Bates is walking her home. 7. Settings: The first and third parts of the novel take place around San Francisco and New Orleans, present time. The second part of the novel which narrates the story of Martin Shade, takes place in San Francisco in the sixties. Santa Cruz – The novel opens in the coastal highway between San Francisco and Santa Cruz as Vanessa and Nick are traveling to meet with Charlie Mann, the ex-drummer of Shade Mann Bates. The coastal terrain is menacing, with sharp drops, reflecting they are stepping into the unknown. In Half Moon Bay, Vanessa sees herself in a young surfer girl paddling in the ocean. Later on, they visit the Santa Cruz Boardwalk with its throwback Seafair and Nick feels the past insinuating itself as if seeping through a crack in time. New Orleans - next they head to meet with Desmond Bates and arrive at the French Quarter at mid-night in the middle of a thunderstorm. They take refuge in haunted hotel. Bates, who is originally from the South, has moved back home in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Bayou St. John, the French Quarter and the St. Louis Basilica are central to the action, especially when Nick plays his father’s trumpet with a young brass band on Jackson Square. Glen Park – described as the foggy lands west of Twin Peaks, Glen Park is a middle-class neighborhood in San Francisco where Vanessa and Nick grew up and where most of the action takes place. This is also the setting for Martin Shade’s backstory. The Black Hawk - is the San Francisco club owned by Erskine, always dark no matter the time of day with back alleyways where hunched figures lurk while getting a fix. -
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How to Isolate Your Characters in the 21st Century
Crafting a compelling mystery is at the core of any good suspense story. It’s the ability to keep readers engaged from the moment the first clue drops in chapter one, through the twists and turns as suspects are introduced and friends become foes, and all the way to the heart-stopping reveal. It’s something that crime, mystery, and thriller authors have been mastering for hundreds of years, using all the classic tropes that crime readers know and love – red herrings, coded messages, smiling assassins, and protagonists who suddenly find themselves cut off from help. It’s this final point that has perhaps evolved the most throughout the history of these genres, due in large part to the invention of cell phones, radio, and wi-fi. Once upon a time, you could isolate characters by virtue of them not being able to communicate easily and instantly; think Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, published in 1939, where eight strangers receive an invitation to an isolated English island. That story might have ended very differently had Vera Claythorne been able to call the mainland police, look up ‘Una Nancy Owen’ on Facebook, or Google “Penguin+Island+owner”). Thus, a problem is presented for modern writers – how can we achieve the same results (characters unable to call for help, no fact finding via Google or social media) when technology is almost constantly at our fingertips? This was a challenge I faced when writing my debut crime novel, The Wolf Tree; like And Then There Were None, my book is set on a remote island (Scottish, rather than English). However, it’s set in the present day, and even remote islands have modern methods of communication – so how could I create an environment where my protagonist, Detective Inspector Georgina Lennox, felt terrifyingly alone? Luckily, writers have figured out some handy ways to circumvent these issues. Using creative techniques, justifiable complications, and by reimagining the meaning of ‘isolation’, writers can still place their characters in scenarios where they’re forced to survive without a technological safety net. Cutting Off Access to Technology The most straightforward answer is, of course, removing your character’s access to technology. It’s also, in my opinion, the most difficult to execute. If we can have Zoom calls with astronauts orbiting Earth aboard the ISS, how are we supposed to convince readers that there’s a place on Earth where someone can’t use their phone? It helps that modern-day writers are writing for modern-day readers – and we’ve all experienced the baffling scenario of walking down a busy city street and somehow hitting a cell tower blind spot. So it really isn’t that hard to believe that characters can arrive in a place where connection to the mainland is minimal, reception is sketchy at best, and wi-fi is a foreign concept. However, it would still be hard to swallow the idea that any location set in the present say wouldn’t have some way of contacting the outside world – so to get around this, perhaps you could have the communication device be closely guarded, kept under lock and key, or have all conversations monitored. Or perhaps a vis major occurs by way of a storm taking out cell towers – as in No Exit by Taylor Adams – phone or computer batteries dying, or a pesky family of rats takes a bite out of the wi-fi cables. A fun way to tackle this challenge – and to punish your protagonist with the irony – is to make the tech-free reality their choice: a workaholic heads to a wellness retreat up in the mountains where laptops are forbidden; an influencer wants to reconnect with real life by taking a phoneless hiking trip. In Killing Floor by Lee Child, former military officer Jack Reacher makes a point of not carrying a phone as he prefers to remain off the grid. In short, making the character responsible for their own isolation is a particularly cruel (and delicious) way to make sure they can’t access help or information. Consider Unique Isolating Settings Another interesting way to isolate characters is to place them not in a location, but as they’re travelling between two places. They could be locked in a vehicle they can’t escape from, such as submarines, cruise ships, planes, spaceships. Sure, you may be able to call for help, but it’s not likely that help will arrive in time to make a difference to whatever predicament you’re in. Examples of this include Bullet Train by Kotaro Isaka, and The Woman in Cabin 10 by Ruth Ware. The idea of being locked also applies small spaces. In Room by Emma Donoghue, Ma was kidnapped and locked in a room for seven years; her son Jack was born in captivity and remained there until the age of five. Similarly, Paul in Stephen King’s Misery is ‘rescued’, then held against his will by the fanatical nurse Annie, unable to call for help due to his debilitating injuries keeping him bedridden, then confined to a wheelchair. Psychological and Social Isolation My favorite method of isolation is perhaps one of the hardest to justify, and it’s one I worked hard to achieve for my book, The Wolf Tree. My protagonist, George, has returned to work after a serious workplace incident benched her from active duty for months – and is now carrying a very heavy secret that she’s desperate to hide from her family and colleagues. Psychological and social isolation can be just as effective as a locked door. Creating a scenario where your character is riddled with paranoia or trust issues – they’re afraid that speaking up will have dire consequences, believe that the people around them are double agents, or they’re convinced their phone or computer is bugged – is a clever way to justify why your characters don’t want to pick up a phone or send an email. The key is making your character believe that they don’t have anybody to call. An example of this is in A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window, where the agoraphobic protagonist Anna believes she witnesses a murder while spying on her neighbors. She calls the police to make a report, but her condition makes her testimony highly doubtful – especially when it becomes known that her medication can cause hallucinations. Even when she does call for help, nobody takes her seriously. In a slightly creepier example, the protagonist of Matt Dymerski’s short Psychosis opens the story by saying they’re writing on paper because they don’t trust their computer, believing that somehow someone could change or delete their words; they are also rattled early on in the piece by two strange phone calls. And things just get progressively weirder as time passes, until they end up locking themselves in their apartment and smashing all their electronics. As you’ve probably noticed – and perhaps is a necessity for isolating characters in the 21st century – writers often layer up the methods mentioned above in order to justify the circumstances. A huge storm and a dead battery; a locked door and a heavy secret. Perhaps the biggest tip I have for writers is that, whatever reason you go with, just make it make sense. Readers will accept the isolating circumstances if you justify them, even if the explanation is as simple as ‘my character doesn’t like phones’ … though, come to think of it, since 21st century readers are pretty much born with a phone in their hands, this one might be the hardest one to accept. *** View the full article -
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The Best Debut Novels of the Month: February 2025
The CrimeReads editors select the month’s best debut crime novels, mysteries, and thrillers. Neena Viel, Listen to Your Sister (St. Martin’s Griffin) Neena Viel’s well-titled debut takes us into a loving but dysfunctional group of siblings at moment of crisis, then turns the tension up to the max. Mid-twenties Calla Williams is burdened by her role as her youngest brother’s guardian, and resentful of the middle child for his ability to get out of care-giving, but she’s also so terrified of losing her closest family that she’s tortured each night by visions of her siblings dying. When her teenage charge gets in trouble for actions at a protest, she takes the three of them on the road to a rented cabin to let the air clear—bringing along her nightmares, and the potential to destroy not only the tight-knit family, but reality itself. –MO Ande Pliego, You Are Fatally Invited (Bantam) In Pliego’s highly engaging debut, You Are Fatally Invited, a renowned and an aspiring author team up to host a writer’s retreat off the coast of Maine, with the latter planning to use the setting to commit a murder of her own, but soon a surprise body drops and she’s busy sorting out the suspects. It’s a novel steeped in a love of mystery, and offers readers a great deal of fun as they navigate the many twists and turns. –DM Christine Murphy, Notes On Surviving the Fire (Knopf) In this intriguing noir, a grad student tries to solve the murder of her best friend while processing her traumatic sexual assault by a fellow student (one who has gone unpunished). Christine Murphy has a phd in religious studies, informing her protagonist’s study of violence in Buddhism; her expertise lends her novel a certain philosophical depth that, combined with its furious rage, makes for a fascinating combination. –MO R.S. Burnett, Whiteout (Crooked Lane) A researcher in an isolated Antarctic station receives disturbing news in Burnett’s heart-pounding debut: a nuclear war has begun, and she may well be humanity’s last survivor. If there are others still there, she holds pivotal information for their future in the face of climate change disasters. The stakes couldn’t possibly be higher in this impressive survivor thriller. –DM Emily J. Smith, Nothing Serious (William Morrow) In what reads as a referendum against the role of “female best friend for straight male narcissist”, a tech worker finds herself torn between loyalty and morality when her bestie dude bro is accused of murder, and she’s recruited as a character witness to prove how he’s actually, like, totally feminist. Nothing Serious is brutal, complex, and necessary, and joins the growing number of novels in which Silicon Valley is not an object of admiration, but of disgust. –MO View the full article -
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The Backlist: Reading Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’, with Ashley Winstead
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin opens with one of the best first sentences I’ve ever read: “Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” Though the novel isn’t structured as a conventional mystery, there’s mystery inherent in that first sentence, and it only grows as the reader learns more about the narrator, Iris Chase, her sister Laura, and Alex Thomas, the man they both love. The novel spans genres, decades, and galaxies, weaving together elements that a lesser writer would never think to put together. I’ve known the writer Ashley Winstead (author of This Book Will Bury Me, Midnight Is the Darkest Hour, and others) for several years, but before this interview, I never realized that she was a Margaret Atwood scholar. (Literally: she wrote her dissertation on Atwood at Southern Methodist University and has published scholarship on the author’s work.) Recently we sat down to talk about braided narratives, genre-hopping, and the definitive take on why female characters should never be described as “unlikeable.” Why did you choose The Blind Assassin? When people asked me what my favorite book was, I always used to say The Blind Assassin. I hadn’t reread it in a long time, so it was a pleasure pick. I think it’s been about eight years since I reread it, and it was a whole new experience. I’d go so far as to say that it’s the book that made me think to myself, “I want to be a writer.” I’m sure there were actually something like a thousand books over the course of my lifetime that slowly convinced me I wanted to do this, but this is the book I remember putting down and thinking, “If I could one day create something one-tenth as good as this, that would be my definition of a successful life.” It was that perfect combination of the voice and the story speaking to my soul, and at the same time the craft being so far out of my level that it made me want to work at this as hard as I could. That’s such a great description of what I think every writer has felt. On the one hand, you have the aspiration to write something as good as the book you just read, and on the other hand, you know you’re not quite capable of it, so you have to keep trying. When did you first read this novel? I was twenty or twenty-one when I read it for the first time. In college, I spent my summers out in San Francisco, where my uncle lives, and I’d work an internship out there. I never knew anyone except my uncle and a few work friends, so I just read a lot. One time I picked up The Blind Assassin, and I had that strong emotional reaction to it right away. Then many years later at SMU, I ended up writing my dissertation about Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and teaching The Handmaid’s Tale to undergrads in Women and Gender Studies classes, but I never worked on The Blind Assassin, even though it’s always been my favorite of her works. One of the reasons I love it is that I think it’s one of the most writerly books I’ve ever read. The main character, Iris, is a writer, and the story centers around an illicit romance between two writers. It’s a book about storytelling that’s deeply meta at certain points. Then on a sentence level, the precision and perfection of Atwood’s language is a marvel. The book is somehow at the same time dry, deeply irreverent, shockingly brutal—all of that. I was an English and creative writing major, and I’d gone to college thinking I wanted to be a poet—cue the obligatory pause for laughter—but by the time I’d found Atwood, I’d decided I wanted to write short stories, and I was taking classes with a lot of incredible short story writers. I was going to every lecture from every visiting writer who came to campus and sitting in the front row, because I was so in love with writing. One time the writer Deborah Eisenberg came to talk to us, and she was talking about braided narrative structure, where disparate parts of the story come together in a way you can’t predict. In The Blind Assassin, you’ll have one chapter with newspaper articles from the 1930’s, and in the next a story of two people having an affair, and in the next the science fiction story that one of them is writing, and in the next Iris as an old woman in her eighties reflecting on her life. Atwood puts all these pieces together and allows the reader to make the connections and associations between them. I just fell in love with that form of writing, and I thought of The Blind Assassin as the ultimate version of that kind of narrative. I think the form appealed to me is because I love the idea of there being connections between everything. Like the butterfly effect, that idea that if a butterfly flaps its wings in California, it can cause a typhoon in Taiwan. In braided narratives, rather than spelling out those causal connections for the reader, the writer gives them the agency to find the connections for themselves. I guess it was probably part of my budding interest in mystery—solving puzzles, putting things together. In this novel, you’re looking at obituaries and diary entries and recollections and trying to extract meaning out of them, and to do that, you have to have this kind of quaint, romantic belief that there is meaning. You trust that there is a thread there, and something beautiful and worthwhile is waiting for you if you can follow it. I love what you said about the puzzles in the novel appealing to the mystery writer in you. Atwood often plays with genre, and The Blind Assassin definitely has elements of a crime novel. You’re wondering, why did Laura drive her car off a bridge? What’s the story there? Throughout the novel, you’re chasing the what and a why. The fact of someone driving their car off a bridge seems so simple and straightforward, and it’s only later that you see all the hidden layers underneath. That sentence that you thought was so direct is only the tip of the iceberg. Have you ever had any contact with Atwood? Have you met her or communicated by email? No, but I would love to, because I’ve been thinking about her work for so long. I promise I’m not going to go on about my dissertation, but when I was writing and publishing about her work, one of my interests was the fact that Atwood was, by some accounts, the first writer to ever incorporate and use an LLC for tax purposes. I was writing a lot about the overlap between writers and corporations, and how writing speculative fiction might connect to the futurism that companies like Exxon and institutions like the CIA practice as a way to explore possible futures and game out the factors that will affect their bottom line. I came to the conclusion that science fiction could be performative in some instances—that it almost walks right up to magical thinking. I was arguing that Margaret Atwood was doing that in Oryx and Crake, and that she had this really interesting perspective about the way to influence people politically that went beyond persuasion. That’s actually the title of one of the articles. But I think I’m going way too deep down the rabbit hole here. No, I think that’s fascinating. I consider myself a failed academic—I will never willingly write scholarship again, but I do like to read it sometimes, and I’m definitely going to look up that article. To get back to The Blind Assassin, I wanted to talk a little bit about how critics reacted to the book when it was first published. In the New York Times, Thomas Mallon called it “overlong and badly written,” and I’ve seen other reviews that said it was too long or too slow. What would you say to those readers? What are they missing? Well, the first thing I’d say is that everyone is allowed to be wrong on occasion. Literary taste is at least somewhat subjective. It honestly gives me a ton of comfort in considering that people give my books one- and two-star reviews, because if some readers can’t see the value in Margaret Atwood, that puts everything in perspective. I think some people are really bothered by the mixing of genres. Like, “You can’t mix science fiction with mystery with romance with historical epic.” But she’s done that throughout her entire career. The woman has no fear. She’s written in every genre, every form. She just does everything, and she’s so beautiful and expressive in her language. She’s everything. So maybe it is the ambition that some readers don’t like. Ambition seems like exactly the right word. The novel spans almost a hundred years and covers major historical events as well as private dramas. I feel like a writer a lot of confidence to write a novel of this scope. Could you see yourself plotting something on this kind of scale? I think so, but I’d probably call it masochism rather than ambition. You have to have a lot of faith in yourself to think that you can pull it off, or else a lot of naivete. When I first started publishing, I tried to go a little easy on myself and not be so ambitious, but now that I’m six or seven books in, I’m trying to be a little bit more conscious of my goals as a writer and how I can get there. Of course the jury is still out on how editors, agents, readers and others are going to respond to that. But what I mean by that is trying my hand at this braided narrative form, trying my hand at blending genres a little more outrageously and in a more self-aware way. The Blind Assassin is always operating at so many different levels. It’s a virtuosic writer (Atwood) writing about another writer (Iris) writing about her affair with a writer (Alex) writing a science fiction epic that also comments on his affair with Iris. The book is so conscious of genres and tropes. When Iris and Alex first get together, he asks her what kind of story she wants him to tell her, but what he’s really asking is, “What do you want from this relationship? What kind of life do you want to have? What kinds of stories are you going to write for yourself?” As a writer, I’m always fascinated by writers thinking about storytelling—not just the kind we do when we sit in front of our laptops and open the Word document, but the kind we’re doing every day of our life when we make choices. I believe that for those of us who are readers, stories become part of who we are and how we act and react in the world, and that becomes a big part of the theme in my novel that’s coming out in March, This Book Will Bury Me. The narrator is conscious of the grief narrative that she’s participating in after the death of her father, and sometimes she succumbs to it, but she’s also able to pull herself out of it and comment on it in an Atwoodian way. A professor in my MFA program told me never to write about writers because it would come off as too self-involved, but I think that as writers we’re all kind of obsessed with the idea that we can shape our lives through narrative, because that’s so much a part of our own experience. It is the most self-indulgent belief, isn’t it? But it’s funny that it’s not just a literary thing—you see it in commercial fiction too, like in Emily Henry’s Book Lovers. I know this probably isn’t a representative sample, but I’ve seen so many Bookstagram posts where people say, “I’m so hungry for books about reading and writing and publishing.” Maybe it’s just having a moment, or maybe this is something that people just really like to read about. The novel is the story of two sisters, Iris and Laura Chase, who are born with wealth, beauty, and (in at least one case) artistic talent, but end up living very sad lives. Did you see Iris, Laura, or both as (gasp!) unlikeable female characters? I think the term “unlikeable female characters” is actually a really sloppy shorthand for a host of other things that people are reacting to. To me, it’s kind of like when doctors used to diagnose women with hysteria, when they meant depression or anxiety or postpartum or PTSD after assault, or even too much independence or whatever. It’s this umbrella diagnostic term that actually tells us nothing at all. I think when you’re reading a book and you start to think that a character is unlikeable, it’s a great opportunity to pause and reflect on why. When we first encounter Iris in The Blind Assassin, she’s this curmudgeonly, crotchety old woman who is really blunt and direct about her bodily functions and her skin smelling of old pee and so on. So if you find her unlikeable, you could ask yourself, is that what you’re reacting to? Is it the fact that she’s supposed to be a sweet old lady but she’s not acting like that way, and she’s being blunt about her body in a way that women aren’t supposed to be? You could ask yourself, do you think the writer intended for you to receive the character this way or feel this way about the character? Why would a writer do that? What’s the intention behind it? But I don’t mean to suggest that the problem is always with the reader. When a reader finds a character unlikable, it could be because they haven’t been introspective enough, or thought about the author’s intentions enough, but it’s also true that that word “unlikeable” is sometimes pointing to an author’s failure. Sometimes people will say that they found a female character boring, or—this comes up a lot in reviews of thrillers and mysteries—they find her choices really questionable or idiotic. Sometimes the word “unlikeable” is standing in for the fact that the writer has failed to make the character three-dimensional, or they’ve failed to give you enough insight into their thinking to convince you that their choices make sense. Sometimes, when we call a character unlikeable, we’re responding to the fact that the writer didn’t have enough distance editorially to see that whatever cool thing they thought they were doing with their character is actually not going to land well for anyone outside their brain. I think that’s the best explanation I’ve ever heard of why that term is so frustrating. And I think we can say that in this novel, we certainly have ample opportunities to understand how Iris and Laura became the people they are. And that’s the beauty of a novel of this scope. Your knowledge of Iris and Laura isn’t just limited to watching them grow up. You’re going back generations. You’re seeing why their grandfather and father are the way they are, and mothers and grandmothers. You’re seeing the scope of the generational trauma that then informs who these two girls are. You can’t see that and not understand Iris and Laura and the choices they’re making, even if you don’t agree with them. I kept thinking that it was like a Victorian novel, because you have that sense of people being in community, being connected to everyone around them, that is so hard to do in the contemporary novel. And the way she characterizes the community of Port Ticonderoga makes them feel very Victorian in their preferences and mannerisms. I don’t know about you, but I get told by editors all the time to narrow my scope. So maybe it’s partly that writers don’t want to attempt novels like this right now, but I think we’re also actively being told not to do it, probably for commercial reasons that are outside my knowledge. Is there anything else we haven’t touched on that you wanted to talk about? I’ve been thinking about the question of why the book resonated so much with me, and one of the things I haven’t talked about yet is the sacrifice that Iris makes in naming Laura the author of The Blind Assassin. It’s really complicated, because Iris gets so many things that Laura never did, and the two sisters in some ways are in competition. It’s not like they have an easy relationship by any means. But as an impressionable young writer at the age of twenty or twenty-one, it felt like the ultimate gift, the ultimate sacrifice, for Iris to give Laura the fame and the legacy and the place in history that could have been hers. Iris knows that in doing that, she’s giving up her own artistic legacy. She’ll be forgotten. She’ll be “meat dust,” as Atwood says at one point. I think a lot about legacy, and I know it’s a very narcissistic thing to be preoccupied with. It’s always possible that I’ll die and there will be absolutely no more readers for my books, but the hope that they will still exist, at least in digital form somewhere, and someone will still read them, that’s such a powerful form of immortality. For Iris to give that up for her sister, it still feels to me like the most powerful sacrifice and act of repentance. In This Book Will Bury Me, everything the main character does is an effort to create a legacy for her father, who she fears is going to be forgotten, and she makes some pretty radical and self-sacrificial choices to give that gift to him. It’s an idea that I just haven’t been able to stop thinking about. I saw it more as one in a series of losses: Iris loses her lover, she loses her daughter and granddaughter, she loses her book. But you’re right that the book is something she gives up voluntarily, and for a writer to make that choice is a big deal. It’s a surprisingly generous and ethical decision, even though I don’t think Iris would describe herself that way. For me, Iris redeems herself through that sacrifice. Maybe for a lot of readers, it’s not redemptive enough, but it works for me. View the full article -
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5 Novels with Flawed Child Prodigies
Child prodigies are annoying. Worse, they’re boring. As a kid, I wanted to believe I was one-in-a-million. Pending that outcome, I read about kids who were. I was drawn to stories where the kid protagonists were uniquely talented. Perfect at chess, math, or solving mysteries. But as I read, I learned something–perfection didn’t work. Child prodigies who outperformed every adult in the room then strolled off for peaceful, unburdened sleep weren’t believable. They weren’t relatable. Worst of all, they made for boring stories. As I grew older, I discovered books where the child prodigies weren’t so perfect. Where adult-level genius didn’t solve every problem but instead invited adult-level challenges. Financial pressures. Social conflicts. Emotional difficulties. Situations that magnified flaws. Gave the prodigies baggage for life. Baggage makes great fiction. In my novel The Contest, Gillian Charles is a former puzzle-master, a child prodigy convinced she’ll win a life-changing competition. So smart, the only puzzle she can’t solve is what to do when she loses. Convinced she’s a failure; Gillian flees the competitive world and spends the next eighteen years avoiding her past. The novel picks up as the past appears on her doorstep, forcing Gillian to confront the baggage she tried to leave behind, but had quietly hauled with her. Of course my novel isn’t the first to tackle the life of flawed child prodigies. Other novels have explored the idea of protagonists struggling with a talent that doesn’t always, or even often, make their lives easier. Here are my favorite five: Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Haddon’s child protagonist Christopher John Francis Boone is saddled with many names, a superior mathematical mind, and behavioral conditions that make fitting in difficult. When his neighbor’s dog is murdered, his structured brain won’t let him leave the mystery alone. He starts to investigate and uncovers not only a surprising killer but some very uncomfortable truths about his own life. Christopher is an entertainingly unique main character, and a perfect example of a prodigy undone by their very nature. Walter Tevis, The Queen’s Gambit Before the Netflix series came the excellent book by Walter Tevis. Beth Harmon knows hardship–she loses her mother and is thrown into an orphanage at an early age. She quickly discovers a talent for chess, and while her skill offers escape from a bleak life, it also fuels her demons. A coming-of-age story where personal worth is entangled with competitive success. Beth’s emotional rollercoaster makes for a great read. Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game A science fiction classic, Ender’s Game follows Ender Wiggin in a future where humans battle alien invaders in a fight so desperate even children are drafted into the struggle. Ender’s genius is clear at an early age, but intelligence complicates rather than simplifies his life. He’s thrown into the hyper-competitive Battle School and groomed to lead Earth to victory, his genius a tool to be used and a weapon to be feared. Without spoiling the ending, Ender’s pursuit of excellence has tragic results, and he must ask himself how much he is to blame. An action-packed novel that also serves as a warning for those who apply their genius without thought to consequences. Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society Although classified “for children” I read this book as an adult, and had a blast following the adventures of Reynie, Sticky, Kate, and Constance, all gifted kids whose very intelligence puts them in danger’s path. On their way to saving the world, each of the prodigies wrestle not only puzzles but feelings of abandonment and challenges with emotional control. The book is an excellent combination of puzzle-solving adventure and character depth that avoids a “smart kids save the day” cookie-cutter outcome. Frank Herbert, Dune Herbert’s Dune is another book-to-film success, one known not only for grand space opera but also its flawed child protagonist. Paul Atreides is only 15 when he’s thrust into the generations-old conflict between his family and their vicious rivals the Harkonnens, and while marked for greatness early on, loss and pain litter his path to power. He uses his wits to navigate violence and betrayal, but with a mounting cost that leaves little of his youth intact. A tale of power corrupting, no matter the intellect or age. *** View the full article -
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Let’s Talk About Spontaneous Combustion
Someone explodes in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Yes, you read that right. Explodes. Allow me to explain. Within the enormous mass of events that together make up the multi-layered plot of Bleak House, there are many strange matters and even a few mysteries… and many characters, varying in the degrees to which they are affiliated with the law, chose to conduct their own investigation in these peculiar events, accounts, and problems, which include ghost stories, rumors of illegitimacy, missing documents, general affairs of lies and deceit, impenetrable court cases, and incredibly suspicious deaths. Amid all the puzzles, and the deductions that follow them, though, there is one bizarre happening in Bleak House that remains relatively uninvestigated: the proprietor of a rag and bottle shop, Mr. Krook, randomly blows up—one of those rare cases, the narrator informs, of that dreaded medical enigma, “spontaneous combustion.” Though this is the most far-fetched death in the novel, or perhaps because of this, it is the one oddity that remains thoroughly unchallenged by the book’s able bunch of problem solvers—the narrator declares it to be so, and this declaration is validated at the inquest in the following chapter. Not only does this death remain unchallenged, or even, un-discussed, for the remainder of the novel, but it also becomes one of the most characteristic features, even though it breaks from the novel’s general rhythm of providing answers to questions brought on by strange phenomena. Dickens wrote: “There is a very little fire left in the grate, but there is a smouldering, suffocating vapour in the room and a dark, greasy coating on the walls and ceiling. The chairs and table, and the bottle so rarely absent from the table, all stand as usual. On one chair-back hang the old man’s hairy cap and coat.” He continues, “Here is a small burnt patch of flooring; here is the tinder from a little bundle of burnt paper, but not so light as usual, seeming to be steeped in something; and here is—is it the cinder of a small charred and broken log of wood sprinkled with white ashes, or is it coal? Oh, horror, he IS here! And this from which we run away, striking out the light and overturning one another into the street, is all that represents him. Help, help, help! Come into this house for heaven’s sake! Plenty will come in, but none can help. The Lord Chancellor of that court, true to his title in his last act, has died the death of all lord chancellors in all courts and of all authorities in all places under all names soever, where false pretences are made, and where injustice is done. Call the death by any name your Highness will, attribute it to whom you will, or say it might have been prevented how you will, it is the same death eternally—inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humours of the vicious body itself, and that only—spontaneous combustion, and none other of all the deaths that can be died.” As dramatic as it is in the novel, this death was certainly challenged in real life. Dickens’s friend G.H. Lewes found this development entirely improbable, and also in bad taste. In his column in The Leader, he wrote, “The death of Krook by Spontaneous Combustion is certainly not an agreeable incident,” he wrote in “but it has a graver fault than that of ‘shocking’ people with ‘sensitive nerves;’ it is a fault of Art, and a fault in Literature, overstepping the limits of Fiction, and giving currency to a vulgar error… Dickens, therefore, in employing Spontaneous Combustion as a part of his machinery, has committed this fault of raising the incredulity of his readers; because even supposing Clairvoyance and Spontaneous Combustion to be scientific truths, and not the errors of imperfect science, still the simple fact that they belong to the extremely questionable opinions held by a very small minority, is enough to render their introduction into Fiction a mistake.” Dickens was frustrated, and accepted his friend’s challenge. In the very next installment of the novel, he justified this narrative decision further, even citing apparent real-life cases of spontaneous combustion. In one very long sentence, he defended himself: “Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable excitement too, for men of science and philosophy come to look, and carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined. Some of these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown on English medical jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so and was occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of the testimony of Messrs. Fodere and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who WOULD investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred and even to write an account of it—still they regard the late Mr. Krook’s obstinacy in going out of the world by any such by-way as wholly unjustifiable and personally offensive.” And then, in a preface to the edition, he justifies this decision further. The possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities) published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject. There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of the Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters, who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which he afterwards republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond all rational doubt, observed in that case are the appearances observed in Mr. Krook’s case. The next most famous instance happened at Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. The subject was a woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having murdered her; but on solemn appeal to a higher court, he was acquitted because it was shown upon the evidence that she had died the death of which this name of spontaneous combustion is given. I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts, and that general reference to the authorities which will be found at page 30, vol. ii., the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received. So there you have it. View the full article -
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Five Minute Mystery: The Case of the Mysterious Dr. Crowley (or, Fuck This World Indeed)
Sheriff Brown surveyed the crime scene through sleepy and bloodshot eyes: Professor Wolf’s books, papers, and household goods had been thrown around his formerly neat cottage seemingly at random, much of his exceptional china now broken, antiquarian books from his carefully curated library torn at the spine. Old Professor Wolf explained to Sheriff Brown that he’d come home from his dawn Naturspaziergang to find his home in shambles. Wolf swore up and down that Dr. Crowley, a professional rival, was the one who had broken into his home, torn through everything he owned, and stolen his secret blueprints for the new space station. If Professor Wolf was to be believed, Dr. Crowley had even ripped up Professor Wolf’s tomato plants in the garden, searching for his classified plans! But while Sheriff Brown could see the state of Professor Wolf’s house, he couldn’t find any clues as to who had broken in, or why. Sheriff Brown, as always in the mornings, was not at his best, and struggled to fight off a hangover. Alcoholism makes detecting hard! So Cynthia Silverton, the best teen detective in the world, was called to the case. Cynthia pulled up in her canary-yellow Cadillac, matching yellow-framed sunglasses on her face, in a charming white sundress and white kitten heels. In her yellow handbag was a Saturday night special, a deck of tarot cards, and a cyanide pill for worst-case scenarios. But today, she wouldn’t need any of them. “Hey, Cynthia,” Sheriff Brown said, bleary-eyed, full of self-loathing and gin in equal measure. Cynthia rolled her eyes. Alcoholics would always break your heart! “Cynthia Silverton!” Professor Wolf exclaimed. “You look the spitting image of your mother. No one here seems to believe me. A very dangerous man named Dr. Crowley has broken into my home and stolen the blueprints to the space station we’re building. I demand that Sheriff Brown arrest him immediately! And I seem to be missing some very valuable gold coins from my safe—Crowley must have taken them while he was here.” Cynthia spent exactly one minute evaluating the scene before she solved the case. But instead of telling Sheriff Brown the solution, she called Professor Wolf’s estranged daughter, Elaine, on the telephone, and had a long and mysterious talk with her in the kitchen. After her talk, Cynthia turned back to Sheriff Brown, whose hands were starting to shake as the morning wore on without a drink. “We don’t need a detective,” Cynthia said to the confused and dehydrated sheriff. “There’s no crime here. You can go home and sleep it off now.” What was the solution? Highlight the text below to see the solution. SOLUTION Cynthia knew every PhD in the Rapid Falls Tri-State Area, and she knew there was no Dr. Crowley. She did, however, remember a villainous Dr. Crowley from one of the old detective movies she used to watch on TV as a child. And she knew that the last time Professor Wolf designed an important space station was thirty years in the past, during his heyday at the Rapid Falls Community College Department of Reverse Engineering. In a fit of confusion and terror, he had ripped up his own tomato plants, looking for gold coins he’d buried twenty years past, believing a societal collapse was near. “You need to come and see your father,” Cynthia said to Professor Wolf’s daughter, Elaine, on the phone. “He has dementia. He’s dying.” “Fuck this world,” Elaine cried. “I guess death really does come for everyone!” “I know,” Cynthia said. “All things must die, and no amount of love can save them. It’s impossible. Fuck this world indeed!” __________________________________ Excerpted from Little Mysteries: Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight by Sara Gran, courtesy of Dreamland Books. Copyright © Sara Gran, 2025. View the full article -
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How One Author Turned Her Nightmares Into a Thriller
Two years ago, I began to remember things that had never happened. I would wake in the morning with these vicious intruders: images and sequences of horrific events, all of them realistic and detailed, all of them entirely false. I knew they weren’t real, but my mind had encoded them as memories, and they felt like memories—traumatic ones at that. I would spend the morning walking through the logic of how they couldn’t be real, proving it to myself over and over again until they gradually faded. Research turned up the cause quickly: insomnia, nights of sleep interrupted repeatedly by my daughter’s prolonged illness, a mind that has always been plagued with particularly realistic nightmares. After a month or so, my daughter improved; we all started sleeping through the night; my insomnia receded, and so did the false memories, but the experience was a haunting one. I have always been fascinated by characters grappling with issues of memory. My favorite thrillers are often ones in which the mystery that must be solved is the character themselves. After my own brush with how disconcerting it is to not be able to trust your own recollections, maybe it was inevitable that my next project embraced the theme so intensely. In A Killing Cold, the main character, Theo, has few early memories. She can’t tell which pieces of what she does remember are real, or dreams, or things she has invented. The foundation of Theo’s existence is a series of unanswered questions. Where did I come from? What happened to me? Who am I, really? If you can’t trust your memories, can you trust your sense of who you are? When A Killing Cold opens, Theo has just gotten engaged to the wealthy Connor Dalton after a whirlwind romance. He’s brought her to meet his family at Idlewood, their isolated winter retreat—a place that feels oddly familiar. And then she stumbles on an abandoned cabin, and in it, a photograph of herself as a little girl. Suddenly, Idlewood’s isolation feels more threatening than charming, and to understand what’s happening now, Theo must turn toward the tattered scraps of her memories. I knew Theo needed to unlock her past, but I didn’t want the process to be straightforward. I wanted not simply a linear progression of knowing a bit more and a bit more until she had the whole picture, but something that reflected the recursive, fractured, and uncertain nature of memory and dreams. I tried to structure her memories in a way where remembering wasn’t enough to provide understanding—and it’s those moments of understanding, piecing together what she’s learned in the present with the fragmented images of her past, that provide the turns and reveals of the book. Theo’s memories and her dreams have become hopelessly entangled, and in dreams a brass dragonfly ornament can take flight; a man can become a monster; a red scarf can hide an entirely different meaning. Even what feels real can’t be trusted. I knew my nightmares-turned-memory were false; I could prove it to myself, and so they faded. Theo has the opposite path to tread: finding the proof to anchor her dreams in reality, to link fragmented images to the truth of the past. But there are falsehoods and misperceptions waiting to snag her, because of course a good thriller needs a few good red herrings and wild twists. I hope the reader will be on that journey with Theo—feeling disconcerted and off balance, but turning and burnishing every piece of memory to see how it fits, how it can illuminate the truth. I want them to be mistrustful, because being mistrustful of yourself makes you mistrustful of everything around you. It’s not a comfortable way to live. But it could just save your life in a place like Idlewood. *** View the full article
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